August 24, 2007 -- On August 16, the day the
new Thomas Jefferson Presidential dollars were released to the public,
Chuck Chichinski of Bellefontaine, Ohio, went to his bank and obtained two
rolls of the dollars. Having read a report on the www.coins.about.com
website that a doubled die reverse existed on the Adams dollar, he quickly went to work to see if any of the new Jeffersons he
had obtained had a similar affliction. By the third or fourth coin
in his first roll, he discovered that he had found his first Jefferson
dollar doubled die reverse! It was similar but more major than the
one alluded to on the www.coins.about.com site!

He called me to report his find on the same
day and mailed two of the coins to me for attribution on the next day.
Upon inspecting one, I found that it was
not only a doubled die that was similar to the Adams doubled die that
Chichinski had seen in Billy Crawford's, Die Variety News
#9, (the variety
alluded to on the www.coins.about.com web site) but that it was almost
identical to an earlier find that was reported by my co-columnist, John
Wexler in his August 20 Varieties Notebook column that we share alternately in the first and third issues of Coin World every
month.

Both the Washington and new Jefferson reverses
displayed arrowhead shaped hub doubling (and some traces of hub doubling
to the west on the Jefferson dollar) that appear to have their origins in the folds of drapery
bunched up on Liberty's right arm directly below the doubling.

The area of doubling on all the Presidential
dollar doubled die varieties reported thus far (which is at least three
for the Washington dollar and one for the Adams dollar) represents the virtual dead center of the coin’s design. This is an important key their attribution because specialists believe they are the result of tilted hubs that were seated into proper position during
hubbing.

In 1997 when the first doubled die cent was
discovered that was produced from dies presumed to be made via the
single-squeeze hubbing process, (showing on the coin as a doubled earlobe
along with over a dozen other areas of doubling in Lincoln's hair), I first proposed that a tilted hub seated into
position by the force of the single impression of the hub was the most
probable cause. Since that time most specialists have come to
agree that this is the most probable explanation for most (if not the vast
majority) of significant single-squeeze produced doubled dies.

Tilted Hub Doubling restricted to such a small area of
design within the center region of the die might also be possible due the hub
being backed off after the initial kiss of the hub into a tilted die blank being
reset into the press properly and hubbed again. However, with the
Presidential doubled dies, we are so far into the single-squeeze hubbing era
that researchers feel the doubling would have most likely occurred when a tilted
hub/die seated into proper position within the single-squeeze of the hub. As the
name implies, the single-squeeze hubbing procedure, impresses a complete design
into a die with just one pass of the hub.

It should be understood that the face of a die blank
(referred to as a “die block” in Mint jargon) is machined with a slightly
conical configuration to aid in the flow of metal during hubbing. This would
indicate that the initial kiss of a hub into a die blank would be restricted to
this centralized area before continuing on to fill out the rest of the design.
During this process the tip of a titled die blank would be positioned slightly
off location away from the center of the hub into a different area of design
than intended and thus the misplaced area of doubling on the affected
die.

Chichinski's find has been listed into the
Variety Coin Register for date, denomination and design type as
VCR#1/DDR#001.